Wait, There's Horse and Buggies in the Future?

I tend to abuse the inter-library loan system for my college.
I guess it's really meant for students who are looking for books for academic reasons and can't find them at Benedictine. I use it for whatever reading I want that I can't find at Benedictine. It is rarely academic.

My boss encourages this, truthfully. We're both lovers of reading, which is why we work at a library, and constantly complain over what we can't find in our own college's collection.

I really didn't begin to abuse it until I saw how no one minded. My boss requested the Angel: After the Fall series for me, showing me precisely how easy it was to request whatever book I wanted on a whim.

A few days ago, I asked for Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep, since I'm a Science Fiction junkie. It came in yesterday and I went missing from the interwebs to read it.

The book is the inspiration for Blade Runner, an awesome movie that everyone should watch. It's set in 2021. I love science fiction in general, so it's very unsurprising that I fully enjoyed this book.

I did, however, run into one interesting thing. My mind constantly glosses over pop culture references when reading realistic fiction. Usually, the setting is in the current time period, and I can understand exactly what they're saying. But I was awkwardly surprised to find some references in a science fiction book. Especially one that was written in the late sixties, while being set fifty years into the future.

They weren't obscure references at all. I came across a simple line on page 26, "Using a Kleenex, he dried his damaged arm."

Kleenex had been around since the 1920's and many Americans refer to any brand of tissue to be Kleenex, but it made me wonder about the word choice. How could Philip K. Dick have expected that Kleenex would still be around fifty years into the future? From my standpoint, he guessed correctly, since I can't see the brand diminishing during the next decade. Wikipedia is telling me that Kleenex is actually in the Oxford Dictionary, but I still wonder if it was when he was writing this, or if the word choice was a conscious decision.

This wasn't the last pop culture reference, either. On page 152, Dick mentions Bank of America. It had already been around for six decades when the book was published, so I guess it was reasonable to predict that it would be around for six more. But what if it hadn't? It is such a vague name that even if it had gone out of business, the audience from future generations would have understood that it is a bank.

The last reference that I made a clear note of was one that I didn't recognize: Greta Garbo. After researching, she was an actress who died two years before I was born. Which would be mean that she would have died over a decade before the setting in this book. He used Greta as a comparison for how a certain character looked. Apparently it wouldn't have mattered if he left out her name, considering that the actress chosen to play Pris in the movie looked nothing like Greta Garbo.

I might be too critical. After asking Twitter if they knew who she was, most people two or more years older than I am knew who she was. My age and younger had no idea. Now, I forget if they mention the approximate age of Isidore and Rick are, but if they are older that 28, it seems reasonable that they would know the name.

It just makes me wonder, what do others think about using popular culture references in Science Fiction? Do they approve? Or disapprove?